​Even by mixed martial arts standards, PFL prospect Lewis McGrillen is a wild man.Experienced Manchester professionals like Brendan Loughnane and Kane Mousah were early champions of the red-headed and red-tempered bantamweight. You’d often open social media apps and find his intense, aggressive faceoffs being excitedly posted, a fight week feature that became his calling card right back to his amateur days.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementIt’s been 14 months since his last outing — a second-round submission of experienced Northern Irish campaigner Alan Philpott following McGrillen’s 2024 PFL Europe tournament title — and due to his absence from the sport, and the interesting life he shares with his fans online, there seems to be so much to ask him about.And not stuff you’d talk to every fighter about either.His head coach at Manchester Top Team (MTT), Carl Prince, once described McGrillen as a “council estate hillbilly” due to his obsessive hunting of England’s invasive grey squirrel. He also has had a series of pets named after serial killers. To add to that, he’s a vocal advocate of England’s most infamous prisoner, Charles Bronson, who has spent more than 50 years in various forms of state institutions, including prisons and asylums.“I watched the film when I was a kid and I’ve read a couple of his books. I’ve finished the one where he’s in Broadmoor asylum. I’m very familiar with him,” McGrillen beams.Lewis McGrillen faces off against Rafael do Nascimento this Saturday at PFL Austin.(Adrián Rubio)“He’s just one of those old-school British hard men, isn’t he? They don’t make people like him anymore and I thought I’d like to give him the support he deserves. At the end of the day, he’s been locked up for like 50 years. He’s not even killed a man and these other people have committed the most heinous crimes and they haven’t got nearly the same amount of time as he has. It’s crazy.”AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementYou see, McGrillen knows he could’ve found himself going down the wrong path had MMA, Prince and MTT not provided him with an outlet to keep him on the straight and narrow.“Not a lot of people get the kind of outlet that MMA has given me,” he says. “It’s only been around since 1993 or something. He was from Luton and he was around in the 1960s and 1970s. We were just coming out of a big depression from the second world war. There wasn’t a lot of opportunities for people. He’s from a dead-end town where there’s nothing there to put your energy into. That’s how you end up thieving and things like that.”There are many layers to McGrillen. Despite his murderous demeanor on fight weeks, he is an exceptionally pleasant young man to chat with. A great example of his sharp duality is that he both loves animals and loves to hunt squirrels.Interestingly, two pets he mentions as we chat are named after serial killers; a snake called Ted after Ted Bundy, and a c